What Is a Brand, Really? (Part I of II)
How an Ancient Practice Became Modern Business
Last week, I explored how psychology trumps technology, as part of my ongoing series, “Brand Shift: The Changing Pattern of Brand Growth,” which you can read here.
This week, let’s trace the context of Brand.
From Proof to Promise
In the 9th century, a Norse farmer heated an iron in flames and pressed it into his cattle’s hide. The mark, “brandr” in Old Norse, meant both the burning and the burned mark itself. Ownership, seared into flesh.
Fast forward a millennium. The word survived, but its meaning evolved. By the late 19th century, “brand” migrated from pastures to products. When design firms emerged in Europe and America around 1910-1920, they began offering “branding” services. However, the work remained largely decorative. A logo here, a typeface there. Ownership marks for a commercial age.
But beneath the surface, something profound was brewing.
“Products are made in the factory, but brands are created in the mind.”
In the mid-20th century, Walter Landor founded Landor in 1941 with his wife Josephine and became a defining voice in branding. You may not know his name, but you’ve seen his work: Levi’s, Bank of America, Sapporo Beer. His insight shifted the conversation: brand lives not on the product, but in perception.
You’d expect “brand” usage to spike during the Landor years with the rise of branding designers. It didn’t.
Google’s Ngram Viewer reveals that “brand” usage declined from the late 1950s to the late 1970s, when the Landors were active. Then, after 1990, it climbed sharply.
What changed?
Mass production taught companies to obsess over “what” and “how.”
Functionality, supply chains, and price points. During the post-war boom, tangible factors dominated. Brand differentiation felt like luxury thinking. Nice to have, but not essential. Companies could win on efficiency alone.
Television changed the game, but not as you’d expect.
With the arrival of TV, advertising became about immediate impact. Memorable jingles, catchy taglines, and product features shouted at living rooms across America. Each campaign stood alone. “Brand” as a cohesive philosophy seemed abstract and unnecessary. The 4Ps ruled everything. Product, Price, Place, Promotion. This was marketing’s gospel through the 1960s and 70s. Brand was just another identifier, a label within the system.
Then came the pivot.
In the late 1970s, thinkers like Philip Kotler began asking different questions. What if a brand wasn’t just a name or logo? What if it were “the promise a company makes to its customers,” something intangible yet valuable? This reframing was seismic.
Globalization accelerated this shift. Companies like Nike, Apple, and Coca-Cola stopped being mere manufacturers. They became storytellers and worldview architects. Nike sold not just shoes; it sold the athlete mindset. Apple sold not just computers; it sold creative rebellion. Coca-Cola sold not just soda; it sold happiness.
These companies placed story at the center. The stories worked across borders, languages, and cultures.
By the 1980s, consumer psychology had shifted. Purchasing decisions became identity statements. Which brand you chose said something about who you were. This cultural transformation explains the explosion in “brand” discourse in business books, advertising theory, and academic research.
The 1980s marked the brand’s metamorphosis from identifier to cultural force: from cattle mark to meaning-maker.
Oldest Technology Behind Every Brand
If modern branding started in the 1980s, how did Coca-Cola build global resonance? How did Nike convince millions to “Just Do It”? How did Apple make “Think Different” feel like a personal invitation?
The answer goes back 70,000 years.
“A brand is a certain kind of story.”
Yuval Noah Harari says this in his 2024 book Nexus. To understand brand, we need to understand storytelling: humanity’s oldest and most powerful technology.
About 70,000 years ago, something clicked in Homo sapiens’ brains. A cognitive revolution. Evolutionary changes to neural structures and linguistic capabilities gave us a superpower: we could create fictional stories and be moved by them.
This wasn’t trivial. Through language and narrative, humans gained the ability to share thoughts, emotions, concepts—even with strangers. We could coordinate not through direct acquaintance but through shared belief in the same story.
Consider animal societies. Lions, elephants, birds, fish, and ants coordinate through direct connections. Humans used to work the same way. Before storytelling, we needed direct relationships to form networks.
But storytelling changed everything.
Harari calls it the “Human-to-Story Chain.” Once we could tell stories, we didn’t need to know each other personally to cooperate. We just needed to believe the same narrative. A story could connect millions, eventually billions, across continents and centuries.
This is the key to understanding brand.
Take Coca-Cola. It’s sugar water with bubbles. Associated imagery? Cavities. Obesity. Not exactly aspirational.
For over a century, Coca-Cola has told a different story: joy, togetherness, refreshment, youth. They’ve invested billions in amplifying this narrative. It worked. People worldwide don’t just drink Coke; they buy into what Coke represents.
That’s when a product became a certain kind of story. Harari calls this intersubjective reality.
Before storytelling, reality had two levels:
Objective reality: rocks, trees, gravity. Things that exist regardless of belief.
Subjective reality: your pain, my joy, and individual thoughts. Things existing only in single minds.
Humans invented a third level: intersubjective reality. Things that exist because we collectively believe in them.
Money. Nations. Laws. Corporations.
Brands.
Stories have the power to create entirely new entities and realities. A swoosh becomes achievement. A bitten apple becomes innovation. Golden arches become comfort.
This is why Harari says, “a brand is a certain kind of story.” Brands exist in the shared space between minds, sustained by collective belief, like all intersubjective realities.
This framework held for most of the 20th century and into the 21st. If you mastered storytelling and amplified it through media, you could message your way into a brand.
But in the last decade, something fundamental has shifted.
Next week: Why the “brand = story” equation no longer works, and what replaces it.
good read, thank you!
Couldn’t agree with you more. An imagined reality is not a lie!